Screw Sustainability: The Age of the Tornado Tamers Busting the Bubble of Spaceship Earth

As teachers you’re reminded over and over again that you have a
profound power, one that goes far beyond your ability to hand out
assignments, to mark papers, and to make out lesson plans. Hidden in
your mind is a lens through which the next generation will see.
Hidden in your mind is a lens whose curves will determine how that
next generation will make its share of history.

That lens is your worldview, the worldview with which you construct
your own version of reality, the worldview that underlies what you
teach, and the worldview with which your students will someday build
THEIR reality.

How potent is the power of worldviews? Aztec kings 500
years ago
climbed to the sacred rooms at the top of their pyramids, slit their
arms, and sacrificed their blood to the sun. Aztec
priests ordered
guards to drag up to 8,000 captives a day to the upper steps of their
pyramids. The priests sawed open the chest of each victim with an
obsidian knife, reached in between the ribs while the victim was
still alive, pulled out the heart, held that frantically-beating pump
up to the sun, then rolled the victim down the pyramid’s steps as
meat for the feasts of the worshippers down below.

Aztec priests and kings didn’t do these things out of cruelty. They
did them to save humanity. They did them to guarantee that the sun
would rise the next morning. In the Aztec worldview, the sun was
skinned alive and went down in blood every single night. You could
see that blood in the red that filled the basin of the sky. It would
take the blood of human beings to give the sun the strength to rise.
For victims and for victors, the Aztec worldview made the difference
between death and life. That is the power of
worldviews.

Then there’s the case of the Tasmanians off the coast of Australia.
For roughly 4,000 years, Tasmanian mothers, fathers, and children
starved to death every time a famine struck. They starved and died
despite the fact that they lived on an island surrounded by seas that
were rich in gourmet delicacies, those swimming, diving fillets
called fish. So why did the Tasmanians die without a bite to eat?
In the Tasmanian worldview, the creatures of the sea were what
cockroaches are to you and me. They weren’t food. They weren’t fit
to eat. Once again, life and death depended on how you
see.

Which leads to the title of this talk. Why, of all things, should we
screw sustainability? Why should we toss the wisdom we’ve gained in
the last 50 years about the fragility of the earth and its eco-system
away?

Why screw sustainability? Because the word implies merely hanging in
there, merely surviving, merely sustaining. It implies a
penny-pinching earth, a miserly existence, a nature that punishes
change, and a nature that prefers small tribes to large groups of
human beings. This sort of attitude has traditionally led to
ignorance and to self-inflicted poverty. It pitched Europe into
misery from the fall of Rome in 476 AD to the revival of optimism,
technology, and entrepreneurialism in 1100 AD. That 600-year-long
slump was the famous dark ages of the West.

An
attitude of
self-denial and an urge to return to the past also led to an age of
darkness in the Islamic Empire starting in 1566. For the first time,
Islam saw its limitations more clearly than it saw its possibilities.
How did it respond? it banned every new technology, shunned every new
idea, and withdrew into fantasies of a past mistakenly viewed as a
paradise. This sustainability-style-thinking was responsible for
the impoverishment of North Africa and of the Middle East that goes
on to this day. Which gives you an idea of the power of worldviews.

Sustainability implies a worldview of a kindly and caring nature, a
nature that’s easily raped by technology, industry, capitalism, and
modernism. It implies a nature that will automatically protect
rainforests, whales, and endangered species if we greedy modern
humans rein in our consumerist lusts. If we get rid of our SUVs and
of our industrial factories, this worldview tells us that nature will
go back to the greenery and the reliability of some mythic good old
days.

But that view of nature isn’t true. Nature is not the motherly
protector. Nature is just the opposite. She tosses us curves and
challenges our creativity. The challenge to create is what Mother
Nature and her favorite game-evolution-are really all about. Which
means we need a major worldview change.

Mother Nature does not build everlasting Edens for the eco-conscious.
Mother Nature is the mother of catastrophe. She’s tossed her
children a major die-off every 26 million years or so, a total of 148
major die-offs that we’ve been able to count. She’s shocked this
planet with six far bigger mass extinctions, six enormous holocausts
of species.

Those die-offs haven’t come from
smokestack factories,
consumerism, and the depredations of capitalism. They’ve come from
the natural evolution of the earth that gave us life. And their
message has been simple. Ride the waves of change or
die.

Mother Nature challenges our ability to surf the waves of change when
she slings us through a 66-million-year-long orbit around the center
of our galaxy, an orbit that takes us through interstellar gas
clusters called local fluff, interstellar clusters that strip our
planet of its protective heliosphere, interstellar clusters that
bombard the earth with cosmic radiation and interstellar clusters
that trigger giant climate change. Just one of those changes could
wipe our civilization…and even the human
race…away.

Nature challenges our creativity with a wildly bouncing atmosphere.
The CO2 level 1.4 billion years ago was at least ten to
200 times
greater than it is today, ten to 200 times greater than it’s
projected to be a few decades down the line even if we continue to
spew the emissions produced by our hyper-industrial economy. When
CO2 levels shoot that high again  and they will
someday
with us or
without us  they’ll melt this planet’s ice, submerge our
cities, turn
our grain belts into swamps, and might well poison us with the few
last breaths we’re able to take. They’ll do all this despite Kyoto
Treaties and despite every reduction of human CO2 output
we can make.

Nature challenges our creativity with an outer atmosphere that
gathers nearly 30 million kilograms of space dust a year. She
challenges us by sending us through a cloud of interplanetary powder
that doubles or even triples this tonnage of cosmic dust every
100,000 years. The darkness and cold this dust produces could make
the old nightmare of a nuclear winter look like a sunny day in
spring.

Nature challenges our adaptability with her taste for far smaller
flicks of her weather whip. In the last 120,000 years there were 20
interludes in which the temperature of the planet shot up 10 to 18
degrees within a decade. What’s more, until just 10,000 years ago,
the Gulf Stream shifted its route every 1,500 years or so. It
stopped heading North to Iceland and instead targeted Europe’s coast,
licking the old continent with unaccustomed warmth. Another fickle
climate twitch of this sort would melt mega-islands of ice, put out
our coastal cities beneath the surface of the sea, and strip our
farmlands of the conditions they need to produce the food that feeds
us.

Then there’s mother nature’s opposite trick  Ice Ages, roughly
80 of
them, from the days 2.2 billion years ago when the planet was an
snowball to a mere 12,000 years ago, when Nature quieted briefly
and
gave our species a short breathing space. But that breathing space
is very short indeed!!

Are there any hints about what Mother Nature demands from us if we
want to survive? Yes, many of them. First of all, Mother Nature’s
catastrophes and the challenges they’ve tossed us made us what we are
today.

We were born as one of the most helpless and
pathetic species
this planet has ever seen.
We were furless and
couldn’t handle the
cold of winter. Furry species like mastodons,
saber-toothed cats, and modern dogs and rabbits could take the winter
cold in stride. But when we are naked, we simply can’t. What’s
worse, we have no fangs and no claws  things eagles and lions
take for
granted. When we first evolved, we were hungry for meat, but we
couldn’t tear prey animals apart with our fingernails. And our
running is horribly slow. Even cockroaches and mice can sprint
faster than we can. So hunting down meat was something we were born
without the tools to do.

Yet we made it through 20 Ice Ages. And we did it living on the most
challenging place of all  the very edge of the glaciers that
were
freezing nearly everything in sight. What’s more, we pulled this off
while gorging ourselves on meat. How the hell did we manage it? By
taking disaster as a challenge, then mastering it. By defying Mother
Nature and flinging her capriciousness back in her
face.

We made new fangs and new claws out of stone. We flaked axes,
choppers, blades, scrapers, spear tips, and much later, arrowheads.
We made our own fur coats out of the skins of the beasts we hunted
down. Our fingers were too weak to dig dens, so we built tents out
of mammoth tusks and mammoth ribs then covered them with mammoth
skins.

We did these things because we refused to shut down in the face of
disaster. We did these things because we refused to adopt
sustainability’s implied strategy, the strategy of retreat. We took
cataclysms as a challenge and as an opportunity.

We
invented new
ways to make tools, new ways to make wealth, and new ways to
celebrate. We invented makeup, art, beads, and fishing hooks. We
invented handles for stone tools. We invented calendars and carved
them into pieces of deer antler to keep track of the seasons. We
invented cave art, sculpture, and music. We did all of these things
during an unstoppable Ice Age.

We did all of these
things in spite
of Mother Nature. We did all of these things because we chose light
over Nature’s darkness. We chose enthusiasm over gloom. We chose to
make an exuberant new future rather than to hide in a puritanical
past. Thanks to our audacious acts of defiance, Mother Nature’s
cruelty and her disasters made us human!

Every talk like this needs a take-home message. Before I go any
further, let me sum up the most important take home message oozing
from the facts I’m telling you. Mother Nature is a vicious bitch.
Catastrophe is her stock in trade. And with our help or without it,
Mother Nature will sooner or later yank everything we take for
granted away. Unless we lay the foundations for a technology and for
a civilization able to harness the energies and surmount the floods
and freezes of change.

If we want to make nature proud, it’s time to ride the whirlwind.
It’s time to tame the forces that twist tornadoes and that swirl
hurricanes. It’s time to harness their energies. It’s also time to
milk energy from the massive pressures of tectonic plates. It’s time
to take our sewage and turn it into fuel. It’s time to take the
excrement of pigs raised by industrial agriculturists and turn it
into a power source. It’s time to see pollution and cosmic rays as a
source of something wonderful and new.

Our trick is not the old sustainability. It’s not to bow and grovel
hoping Mother Nature will freeze in place. Our challenge is to
outrun nature by inventing radically new ways to deal with change.
We have to be able to raise food in drought. We have to be able to
grow food in flood or in a new ice age. If necessary, we have to farm
the bacteria that love the deep freeze of the Antarctic, the bacteria
that live in rock and clouds, and the bacteria that thrive in
radioactivity.

Who has given us this mandate, this commandment, this imperative?
Nature has!!

Surely that statement is just BS. It’s flashy but empty
rhetoric. Nature doesn’t really give us any hints about what she and
her evolutionary process demand of us. Or does she? The answer is,
she does. Stop and think for a minute. If this were a random
universe, there would be a thousand different biochemical systems
competing with each other on this planet, a thousand different
families of life. But there aren’t. The only biochemical family on
this planet is the clan of DNA, the clan of biomass. And you and I
are part of that biomass family. We are part of that biomass team.

Bacteria were our foremothers 3.85 billion years ago. They, like us
are based on DNA. Which means we are related to the bacteria in our
gut, the bacteria on our teeth, the bacteria that makes our poop
stink, the bacteria that rot our bodies and our meat, and the
bacteria that infect us when we come down with pneumonia or with food
poisoning.

Insects, lizards, and lobsters are our
cousins. They,
too, are the children of DNA. They use the same sort of cells that
combine to make your body and mine. Their brains operate with many
of the same neurochemicals that keep us thinking, worrying, and
dreaming. Thanks to DNA, we are also related to pond scum, to
tapeworms, to fleas, to snakes, to weeds, to trees, and even to the
food we eat, even if we’re vegetarians.

What’s more, we are all part of a single public project, a single
grand ambition. There’s a basic imperative that drives our family,
the clan of biomass, the family of DNA. What is it? To reproduce!
To recruit every atom on this planet into the DNA system. And to do
it so frantically that the DNA family makes it through the next mass
extinction, no matter what kind of dirty punches Mother Nature throws
our way.

This is where the old sustainability folks,
the
post-Club-of-Rome folks, the proponents of a planet with limited
resources, the ones who say that we’re plundering a fragile earth,
get it wrong. Very wrong indeed. We are using less than a
quadrillionth of the resources of this planet. There is 1.097
sextillion cubic meters of rock, magma, and iron beneath our feet.
That’s a one-with-twenty-one-zeroes-after-it stock of raw materials we
haven’t yet learned to use. We haven’t yet learned to turn that
sextillion-square-meter stockpile into fuel, food, or energy. We
haven’t yet recruited it into the clan of biomass, into the clan DNA.

But that’s the imperative of biomass, to take these inanimate
molecules and bring them into the system of life. Does this sound
like mere fantasy? It’s not! Bacteria called lithoautotrophs are
already doing it. Lithoautotrophs are eating the rock two miles
beneath our feet and three miles beneath the sea, turning granite
into food, turning raw stone into biomass, recruiting new atoms into
the imperialistic project of DNA.

Then there are the extremophiles you read about if you follow the
science headlines. Extremophiles are bacteria that feast on sulphur,
bacteria that live in water hotter than the water boiling in your
cooking pot, and bacteria that some researchers suspect live in
clouds two miles above our heads, bacteria that the
New Scientist
magazine speculates may work to change the weather to create
precisely the sort of sauna in the sky that they like best, their own
sky-riding paradise. Those bacteria are doing what nature commands
them to do. To reproduce they are defying nature’s rules. They are
changing what’s old into something new. They are resculpting cloud
formations. And in the process, they are giving nature entirely new
tools.

It is time to learn lessons from bacteria, our more
successful
ancestors.

Mere bacteria are outpacing us at research and development. They’re
outpacing us at opening new frontiers to the public project of
biomass. They are teaching us many a lesson.

Lesson number one is
that the resources of this planet are almost endless. Bacteria are
teaching us that there are new frontiers, new riches, and new feasts
for those species that dare to defy nature and that dare to innovate.

Lesson number two is this. Nature does not shun
megasocieties. She
does not favor small tribes. She favors humongous social groups that
network their information so well that they form a high-powered
collective intelligence, a group brain. A bacterial colony the size
of your palm is the norm in the microworld. And that small colony,
that bacterial city, has roughly seven trillion citizens  more
than
all of the humans who have ever lived.

Eshel Ben-Jacob is the holder of the Maguy Glass Chair of Physics
at
the University of Tel Aviv. His bacterial research has landed him on
the cover of
Scientific American. And fortunately Eshel is one of
my closest friends.

Eshel will tell you that a
bacterial colony is a
giant parallel processing machine, an intelligent machine that does
what no computer can do. A bacterial colony perceives a problem,
looks for a solution, then comes up with a creative way out of its
bind. A bacterial colony does something astonishing. It reengineers
its genome to make hay out of new forms of emptiness or devastation.
That’s why bacteria are defying mere sustainability and outpacing us,
out-racing us. That’s why bacteria have been the longest-running
players in the evolutionary game.

One the many lessons bacteria teach with their colonies of trillions
is this. When it comes to groups, Nature does not favor tribes, she
favors size.

Bacterial lesson number three is one I’ve implied half a dozen
times.
It’s a very strange lesson to absorb. Nature rewards those who oppose
her most. Let me repeat that: nature rewards those who oppose her
most.

Nature rewards those who invent new ways to
circumvent her, new
ways to get around her old limitations, new ways to make something
radically beyond the previous boundaries, and new ways to break her
rules. In the end she punishes those who merely ride her periods of
stability. She wipes them out utterly. She rewards those who are so
inventive that they can surf the waves of unpredictability. Nature
rewards those who extend her powers, something lithoautotrophs have
done by finding new ways to defy the norms of yesterday and to
transform the molecules of rock into molecules of life.

This bacterial lesson hints that we humans are at
our
best when we do
what bacteria do, when we add to Mother Nature’s capabilities. We
are at our best when we invent new technologies, when we invent new
strategies, when we grow the web of social interaction in new and
larger ways, when we invent new tools, new gadgets, new ways of
combining and upgrading genes, new ways of cloning, new ways to use
the principles of biology, and ironically, new ways to show off and
to strut our stuff. In other words, we add the most to nature’s bag
of tricks when we do what some see as “violating” her.

How do bacteria prove that the lessons I’m outlining to you are
correct? Bacteria are the only species that’s been here since the
very beginning of life and are still here today. Other species have
only managed to hang in there for anywhere from 1.6 million years to
160 million. We humans are one of the shortest-lived natural
experiments around. We’ve been here in one form or another for a
paltry two and a half million years. More important, in our current
form, as true Homo sapiens, we’ve only been around for a mere 38.5
thousandth of bacteria’s time on this planet. We’ve been here for a
pitiful 100,000 years. Compared to us, bacteria outlast diamonds.
Bacteria are forever.

Here’s another indication that bacteria have gotten Mother Nature’s
lessons right  another bit of proof that bacteria can show us
nature’s
hidden ways. 3.5 billion years ago when life was spanking new there
were apparently only eleven species of bacteria. Today we’ve counted
over eleven million. And we’ve just realized that our count may be
much, much too low.

That’s a triumph!! Every bacterial species is a new victory, a
carver of a new environmental niche, a creator of a new way of
turning garbage into gold. Every bacterial species is a testament to
the power of invention, to the ability to break mother nature’s mold.

Fortunately the old roll-back-the-clock sustainability is being
discarded even as we speak. And a very new point of view is taking
its place. The new sustainability has dropped the visions of gloom
and of limitation. It has replaced those cramped visions with
innovation. Like bacteria, the new sustainability triumphs in
finding new uses for waste.

The Thermal Conversion Process, or TCP, mimics the earth’s natural
geothermal process by using water, heat and pressure to chemically
reform organic and inorganic wastes into specialty chemicals, gases,
carbons and fertilizers. Even heavy metals are transformed into
harmless oxides.

A company called
Changing World Technologies in West Hempstead, New
York, has developed something it calls the Thermal Conversion
Process. It claims that this process uses “water, heat and pressure
to reform industrial and agricultural by-products into oils, gases,
specialty chemicals, carbons and fertilizer.” In other words,
Changing World Technologies claims to have invented a process that
performs the bacterial trick, that makes garbage into
gold.

Changing
World Technologies claims that it can remake the molecules of
industrial waste and city sewage  two major sources of
pollution  into
the fatty acids used to make “detergents, soaps, cleaners,
stabilizers, industrial surfactants and pharmaceuticals, personal
care products, lubricants and rubber products.” It claims that its
plants produce natural gas  methane, propane, and butane 
the
fuels
that drive power plants, the fuels that produce electricity, the
fuels that heat homes, and the fuels that are used in buses on the
streets of major population centers like Los Angeles and Long Island
today. It does all this from garbage and from sewage. It does all
this from waste.

Changing World Technologies claims that its Thermal Conversion
Process also produces the cyclohexane used to make nylon, the benzene
used to produce rubber, the toluene added to aviation fuel to
increase its octane rating, the activated carbon used to filter waste
water, and mineral-rich solids that can prove invaluable as
fertilizers, returning essential micronutrients to the soil. All of
this from garbage. All of this from, frankly,
s—-.

Changing World Technologies’ thermal process also produces, guess
what? An oil that the company says is competitive with petroleum in
price and quality. With that oil, the company says, it can make a
plant on the site of a major waste producer as profitable as the oil
strike of a small wildcatting company. And Changing World
Technologies has shown signs that many of its claims are true in the
first steps of a worldwide deal with one of America’s biggest
food-processing monoliths, ConAgra Foods, a deal in which it’s built
a plant near a Butterball Turkey factory in Carthage, Missouri, a
plant that turns that factory’s throwaways into products that you and
I need. It has also leant weight to its
case with a pilot plant in Philadelphia’s Naval Yard that turns city
sewage  the stuff you and I defecate every day  into a
river of riches.

For every fifteen BTUs of energy put in to the Thermal Conversion
Process, Changing World Technologies claims it gets 100 BTUs back.
That’s a hefty return on an investment in what’s called “solid
waste”, a big payback on an investment in pollutants and excrement.

Someday in the not-too-distant future, Changing World Technologies is
hoping to mass-produce a small thermal process plant, a plant that I
suspect you and I will be able to use in our homes to turn our
garbage into fuel and into materials that will help us earn trickles
of cash from our feces and our other throwaways.

Changing World Technologies is now on the prowl for other plants it
can construct in partnership with companies that are super-polluters,
companies whose streams of waste can be turned into new sources of
revenue and new sources of security for those of us who use fuels,
nylon, and food, but can’t afford to see their prices
skyrocket.

That’s opening new horizons, not tightening your belt, not abandoning
the pursuit of your wildest dreams, and not shutting down. It’s not
merely hunkering in place and sustaining, it’s soaring.

I call this sort of new environmentalism echo-techno-pioneering, or
echo-tech for short. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times calls it
“the geo-green strategy”. And Michael Shellenberger of the
Breakthrough Institute in El Cerrito, California, calls it simply
“post-environmentalism”. But whatever you call it, it’s a small step
toward following the imperative of biomass, toward fulfilling the
demands of the family of DNA, and toward listening to the lessons of
bacteria. It’s a step toward seeing every cataclysm as an
opportunity awaiting the technology that will harness
it.

Another organization in the front lines of eco-techno-pioneering,
Energy Independence Now, claims to be spearheading research in
turning garbage into hydrogen, the fuel for a future hydrogen
economy. The organization, based in Santa Barbara, California,
doesn’t see shut down and self-denial-just sustaining  as its
mission. It views itself as a vital part of California’s quest for
“competitiveness and job growth.”

Yet another organization in the post-sustainability movement, the
echo-techno-pioneering movement, is the
Apollo
Alliance, an alliance
of 23 labor unions, of the AFL-CIO, and of more than 50% of America’s
environmental groups. The Apollo Alliance is pushing for the rapid
development of new technologies like hydrogen cars, “high performance
buildings”, solar power, biomass power, wind-produced power, and
magnetic levitation trains to make America energy independent, to
restore economic competitiveness, and to create three million new
American jobs. The Apollo Alliance, too isn’t pushing for
self-denial, it’s pushing for new frontiers. In fact, it’s named
itself after the crash program that put men on the
moon.

Ted Nordhaus, vice president of an opinion research firm called
Evans/McDonough has released a white paper that says that
environmentalism is dead. The movement that’s grown since Rachel
Carson published
Silent Spring, her book on the devastating effects
of DDT in 1962, is a walking corpse.

According to the Evans/McDonough
white paper,
polls show that the mass of North Americans love the notion of saving
the earth but distrust the planet’s self-appointed saviors,
environmentalists. 41 percent of the public sees environmentalists
as “extremists”. That’s one of the reasons this white
paper is called “The Death of Environmentalism”. But
environmentalism is not dying. It is being reborn. It is switching
from a vision of gloom to a vision of light. It is switching from
techno-fear to techno-lust.

Even John McConnell, founder of Earth Day, has turned from talk of
shucking technology to visions of opening new frontiers through
eco-techno-pioneering. “It is my dream,” he said in a mass email
sent out April 23, 2005, “that the Battle for Earth will bring a
rapid transition from polluting fuel to clean energy…[and] new
villages where interactive communication by computer enables people
to work in their homes or neighborhood for offices in other cities.”
McConnell has switched from visions of a society that radically reins
in its energy needs to one that revels in the powers of electricity
and that puts a computer in every home and on every
desk.

Now it’s time to wake up people like McConnell, the folks at The
Apollo Alliance, Energy Independence Now, the Breakthrough Institute,
Changing World Technologies, your students, your fellow educators, my
colleagues, and, most important, the media and the general public to
the real nature of mother nature. It’s time to change their
perceptual lens, their worldview.

It is time to show
them that we
need to do far more than milk energy from garbage. We need to
anticipate and harness the powers of nature’s favorite
test-mechanisms, massive climate changes and catastrophe. We need to
make moveable farms, something we could do with hydroponics. And,
more important, we need to make something impossible  moveable
cities. The Mongols had a moveable city and moveable towns in 1332
AD.

They went mobile by building their yurts, their
felt tents
complete with grilled windows, on wagons. Today we have the makings
of floating cities in our offshore oil platforms, which can be built
in clusters, can house over 300 people each, can keep their
inhabitants safe from flood and storm, and can give them movie
theaters and sports facilities.

Meanwhile, an
engineer-turned
entrepreneur named Norman Nixon is promoting a plan for Freedom Ship,
a floating metropolis for 50,000 ultra-rich inhabitants who will
live, work, and travel on a mega-cruise ship, a ship that’s nearly a
mile long, 35 stories high, and has 100 diesel engines. This
sea-roving center of financial might will be linked to the world by
satellite phones and by the Internet. And Eugene Tsui, a
Chinese/American architect who has caught the eye of NASA, has even
bigger dreams. He’s sketched plans for “Nexus”, a floating city of
100,000.

But no matter how we make our urban populations mobile, we need to
realize that 60% of the humans on this planet live in coastal areas,
and that no matter how many Kyoto Treaties we sign, those coastal
cities will someday be at the bottom of the sea.

As I said in the beginning, we have to learn to raise food in
drought. We have to learn how to grow food in flood or in a new ice
age. If necessary, we have to farm the bacteria that love the deep
freeze of the Antarctic. We have to suck energy from tornadoes,
hurricanes, and climate shifts and use that energy in our homes. We
have to recruit every atom that we possibly can into the scheme of
DNA, into the clan of biomass, and into the family of
life.

We have to have a trick up our sleeve for every curve that nature
throws us…because tossing us curves and challenging our creativity
is
what Mother Nature is all about.

This is not an easy challenge. But you and I have to become the
ultimate players of Mother Nature’s game. And you and I have to be
the ultimate educators in the skills of riding nature’s challenges,
her catastrophic waves of change.